How to Select Right Web Hosting for Successful SEO

Does web hosting affect SEO? You could certainly ask this question when planning the first business website. It’s true, that whichever hosting service you pick has a notable impact on your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, it is lot more than just a ranking. Let’s see more about how it works.

The Three Major Factors

A web host plays an important role in determining your website performance. Services differ as for the web host, different web hosting provider offers various features, some of them may vary from provider to provider.

The three major factors that can be affected by the hosting service include:

Speed

Uptime/Downtime

Location

#1. Speed

A speed of website not only affects performance but also determines its ranking. Even if Google has not yet defined clearly that how it ranks the websites, it’s clear that a load speed is considered as one of the parameters in search engine ranking.

There are various factors that can make any website slow, it can be because of poor development, inefficient coding, and the hosting. In the case of hosting, hundreds of other sites are hosted on a shared server that makes your website to be slower.

Optimum performance and maintaining your business website is a significant factor in your operation, it’s best to choose a dedicated server.

You can also check your website loading speed with some reliable tools like:

Google PageSpeed Insights

Pingdom

GTmetrix

#2. Uptime/Downtime

In the simple terms, when your website goes down it refers to a downtime and becomes inaccessible due to the factors such as technical failure or maintenance. Your website gets crawl several times in a day by search engine spiders. And if the search engine spider detects frequent or extended downtime, it would negatively affect the ranking of your site.

On the other hand, Uptime refers to the time where your website is up and running without any disturbance.

There are numbers of factors to be considered in uptime of a website, and performance of the hosting is one of them. It is tough to get 100% uptime, but the best you must look is for 99.9% uptime.

#3. Location

In addition to speed and downtime, the location of your hosting service provider is also a major determining factor in terms of SEO. For instance, if your targeted audience is from the US, then you must select the US based hosting server, and if targeted audience is from India, then select India based hosting server, such as Dedicated Servers in India. There are various indicators which search engines use to decide where your site is hosted, and an IP address is one of them.

Selecting an SEO-friendly Web Hosting Service

It is essential for the business website owners to choose an SEO-friendly hosting service as a significant phase of the marketing process.

Here’s a step by step method that will guide you in the right direction:

Determine the basic requirements. A simple research on the hosting plans and its features can give you the clear insight. However, if you are new to this and don’t have any idea about what are the specifics, you must research to understand your requirements before making any final choice.

Here is the simple list for the beginners, some basic web hosting types, how does it works, and its benefits:

There are three main types of hosting services:

Dedicated Hosting Services

Shared Hosting Services

Virtual Private Servers

Dedicated Hosting Services: You rent for the single server for hosting only your important websites, and that you don’t share with anyone.

Benefits: You get full server control with a choice of hardware specifications, OS and many more.

Shared Hosting Services:You rent a server that allows multiple sites to share a physical Web server and its resources.

Benefits: More reliability and higher speed along with high uptime and extensive bandwidth.

The following are some other basic terms related to hosting:

Bandwidth: The data transfer amount (upload/download) per month.

Disk space: A storage space available for you on the server.

Operating system (OS): The two standard hosting operating systems are Linux and Windows. Linux is quite cheap as open source.

(C-panel) Control panel hosting: Almost all web host services offer some sort of c-panels to the users for adding domains and custom configure settings.

IP address: It is a unique string of number which identifies the location of your server on the internet.

If been fresher in web hosting, it is always good to know marketing jargons as well.

Free website builder – Never get it as a test to shortlist your web hosting service. There are many user-friendly and flexible website development platforms ready such as WordPress.

Search engine visibility – This feature is still used to offer as an add-on by many hosting providers. Many of them sell this add-on as a paid when everyone is aware that the website must be visible in search engines. No extra effort is needed for it from the hosting provider.

Checking feedback and reviews about hosting service providers:

Once you recognize and finalize your exact requirements, shortlist some best providers and spend some time and search for customer feedback and reviews about each. With the presence of public discussion boards and social media platforms, it has become quite easier for everyone to collect information about any products and services.

You must take a note of the two key aspects while considering any user feedback:

Security issues – inefficiently operated servers are exposed to hacker attacks, where your site can go as damaging to your computer. Check frequently if any users are complaining about this issue for any particular web host.

Customer support – An essential aspect of service available at any time like web hosting. Best reviews about the customer support are the initial thing that represents an ideal service provider.

Overall, you should take important decision wisely. If buying any hosting for the first time, take some time for the research and then make a knowledgeable and well-informed decision. Understand your basic requirement, and consider multiple options before selecting.

Author Bio:

Article by – Shweta. S : I am a professional working in a web hosting business and I wanted to share my views on Web Hosting. If you are interested in knowing more about hosting then visit: Web Hosting Services in India.